Realizations

from my journal - January 22, 2013

Recently, I've had some revelations about my grief for my father. I realize now that there are unresolved feelings of anger and guilt. My grief has been a way of becoming him, of placing myself inside his pain. I still have not accepted his death. And, because of that, I have not mourned him. I've noticed how, in my dreams of him, there is always a moment when I declare that he is alive again. I go around announcing his resurrection to everyone. These dreams are not only enacting my desire for him to come back from the dead, they also represent my inability to acknowledge his death and mourn. I keep wanting to go back and change everything. As long I resist the truth of his death, I will be trapped in my grief. He will never again be alive. It is final and some part of me refuses to truly accept that. I want things to be as they were and, in some way, this is what is killing me--my obsession with the past, my aching for it. But I don't know if I can change or let go of the aching. Aching is all I know. Will I ever remember him without desperately needing to be with him again, without almost losing my mind? Do I even want that? I see that the grieving keeps him alive while the mourning puts him to rest. I think, unconsciously, I want to be consumed by his death. I want him to haunt me. I want to be obliterated by grief. It is a kind of self-destruction that I cannot turn away from.